Organizations representing deaf people in Baltimore and beyond are condemning Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young for stopping a deaf interpreter from relaying the words of a protester at the mayor’s Tuesday press conference outside City Hall.
“You interpret for us,” Young had said, cutting the interpreter off after he began signing the words of Mark Council, a homeless man who had
interrupted the press briefing along with other activists.
The mayor’s words came after his spokesman, Lester Davis, rebuked the interpreter and a woman off-camera shouted, “He’s here to interpret for the mayor!”
The interpreter stood with hands clasped as Council went on for nearly three minutes, calling on Young to do more to protect homeless people from the coronavirus by getting them out of city shelters.
Selective Editing
But deaf and hard-of-hearing people were not the only ones who experienced censorship at the event.
Virtually the entire homeless protest sequence – Council’s speech, the chiding of the interpreter, the horn honking – was edited out of the city’s official video of the mayoral briefing.
Jacob Leffler, a city resident who is deaf, had watched the protest on WBAL-TV’s Facebook live video, then found it missing from the YouTube version on CharmTV’s “Government” page.
“That made me angry and frustrated,” Leffler said. “It’s depriving the community of information.”
Also condemning the censorship was Housing Our Neighbors, the group which mounted the protest.
“The fact that the city would censor a homeless man making a life or death plea to house our city’s most vulnerable, shows where their values are,” said member Rachel Kutler, reading from a group statement.
